same way, in Spain, the bull-fighters, a body of men admirable for their graceful strength, their modesty, courage, and skill, nearly always come from country districts, although it is in the towns that the enthusiasm for bull-fighting is centred. Therefore, it would appear that until urban conditions of life are greatly improved, the more largely urban a population becomes, the more is its standard of vital and physical efficiency likely to be lowered. This became clearly visible during the South African War; it was found at Manchester (as stated by Dr. T.P. Smith and confirmed by Dr. Clayton) that among 11,000 young men who volunteered for enlistment, scarcely more than 10 per cent could pass the surgeon's examination, although the standard of physique demanded was extremely low, while Major-General Sir F. Maurice has stated50 that, even when all these rejections have been made, of those who actually are enlisted, at the end of two years only two effective soldiers are found for every five who enlist. It is not difficult to see a bearing of these facts on the birth-rate. The civilized world is becoming a world of towns, and, while the diminished birth-rate of towns is certainly not mainly the result of impaired vitality, these phenomena are correlative facts of the first importance for every country which is using up its rural population and becoming a land of cities.
From our present point of view it is thus a very significant fact that the equipoise between country-dwellers and town-dwellers has been lost, that the towns are gaining at the expense of the country whose surplus population they absorb and destroy. The town population is not only disinclined to propagate; it is probably in some measure unfit to propagate.
At the same time, we must not too strongly emphasize this aspect of the matter; such over-emphasis of a single aspect of highly complex phenomena constantly distorts our vision of great social processes. We have already seen that it is inaccurate to assert any connection between a high birth-rate and a high degree of national prosperity, except